Valve’s new Steam Guard trading protections go down poorly with users

29 Aug 2013 by Peter Parrish

No more of this for 15 days if you’ve fallen foul of the new restrictions.

Yesterday’s server update brought new trading restrictions/protections (depending on your point of view, really) to Steam’s Marketplace. The post about it in the Steam forum states that in order to trade, the user account needs to had Steam Guard enabled on it for 15 days. If not, there’s a 15 day delay on the account/browser/device before it can be used for trading those delicious hats and virtual cards.

Valve’s post adds “To avoid this restriction from triggering you should not delete Steam cookies from your browser, deactivate Steam Guard on your account or reinstall the Steam client.” The company line on this is that it will “prevent trading on your account before you are able to react if your account is hijacked.”

Unfortunately, as the (at the time of writing) 55 page thread shows, this policy is going down like a lead balloon with extra lead weights tied to it. Multiple users are claiming that they’re barred from trading despite having Steam Guard active on their accounts, others are annoyed that the policy was just imposed overnight without warning. Yet further people are asking for the restriction to be reversible upon the correct answering of a security question (or similar,) or for the 15 days to be lowered.

If you’ve followed all the instructions and still find yourself locked out of trading, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of support options open to you at present.